


Locked In

by ssrhpurgatory



Series: Inappropriate fucking in a lab environment [2]
Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Accidentally locked in a room together, Angst, F/M, Mutual Pining, Way Too Many Feelings, sex in a lab
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-10
Updated: 2018-06-10
Packaged: 2021-03-04 00:48:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,438
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24634807
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ssrhpurgatory/pseuds/ssrhpurgatory
Summary: Hilbert (terrible 90s alias Karl Kelley) and Rosemary get locked in his lab when the power goes out during a hurricane and have a very... frank conversation. And then bang. (AKA the author got a trope mashup request on Tumblr several months ago and didn't mean to write this but WHOOPS.)Written June 2020, backdated to hopefully take it out of current works.
Relationships: Alexander Hilbert/Original Female Character
Series: Inappropriate fucking in a lab environment [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1661833





	Locked In

**Author's Note:**

> Does not fit in the chronology of anything else on this account, but is an instance of inappropriate fucking in a lab environment so gets shunted into that Series of Shame.
> 
> [The trope mashup prompt that set this off](https://madtumbleson.tumblr.com/post/612240185379422208/rosemaryhilbert-locked-in-a-room-i-didnt) except I never hit the second to last bullet point on the list BUT GOD it would take another 2000 words to get them to that point and this was already too long.

“You _are_ still up here.”

Karl whipped his head up from where he had been hunched over a table, startled. Rosemary Epps, his lab manager, was standing near the door to his lab, her hands on her hips and a frown on her face. He had not even heard her enter the room.

“If you’re not going to leave your lab phone on the hook, you should at least keep an eye on the weather,” she continued irritably, crossing the room to said phone and returning it to its cradle. “I was on my way out, you know, but I saw the light on and thought I ought to make sure you didn’t get trapped up here until this little storm blows over.”

This little storm, as she put it, was a Category 3 hurricane. A Category 3 hurricane that had not been meant to make landfall until the next morning, but if Rosemary was trying to get him out of the lab building, the weather had to be getting close to dangerous already. He looked her over. The tall bangs of her hair certainly seemed significantly less perky than usual, and her bright green linen dress suit was more than a little damp. And the blouse underneath... it was a thin cotton in a pale, patterned yellow, and it was currently plastered wetly to the upper curves of her breasts.

She raised her eyebrows deliberately. “Are you coming?”

“Er.” Karl swallowed hard. “It is just I was in the middle of...” he gestured to the test tubes in front of him. Decima required regular propagation in cell cultures in between tests on live subjects, and he was preparing samples for the process.

Rosemary sighed and rolled her eyes. “How much work to get it finished up?”

“An hour. Perhaps two,” he admitted. He had expected to have more time before the storm got close enough or dangerous enough to require him to leave his lab.

“Right.” Rosemary firmed her jaw and tugged on the front of her suit jacket, an unconscious move probably meant to prepare her and which only exposed more of that wetly clinging blouse and, to his fascination, the shape of the bra she wore beneath. “Let’s see what I can do to get that down to half an hour.”

She scrubbed down at the sink in the corner of his lab and gloved up before settling in at his side, taking half the test tubes from him. Twenty-five minutes later, she took half of what remained of the test tubes she had left for him, her motions economical and rote and far more efficient than his own.

Of course, Karl’s own efficiency suffered somewhat from having her within eyesight. He kept catching glimpses of that that thin blouse of hers out of the corner of his eye, which stayed plastered against her warm brown skin even as it dried.

Her fingers snagged his wrist, warm even through the gloves they both wore. “Steady, doctor.”

“What?” He looked her head on. She had raised a warning eyebrow at him, and was studying him intently. “What is wrong?”

She released his wrist. “You were shaking.”

No wonder if he had been. To have her this close, in this state... he shook his head to clear it. “I am fine.”

Rosemary returned her attention to her own work with a frown. “When did you last eat?”

“Lunch?”

She shot him a sharp look. “You don’t sound very certain of that. Did you eat a proper lunch? Or did you just have a protein bar?”

It had been the latter. “A proper lunch,” Karl growled at her. “You do not need to interrogate me.”

“So it was the protein bar. You really do need a caretaker to keep you from starving yourself, don’t you.” Her tone was conversational, with the slightest hint of recrimination, and it sent Karl further into what was becoming an increasingly foul temper.

“I get distracted,” he said, wincing at the whine in his own voice.

“That doesn’t mean you don’t need to eat,” she shot back. She finished with the rack of test tubes in front of her and picked it up. “I’m just going to put these in the incubation chamber and see if I can’t find you something to snack on.”

“Can wait until I get back to apartment,” he responded through gritted teeth. Thank goodness this woman was so often annoying; it was easier to be irritated by her than it was to consider that she left him wanting to... wanting to...

“And I doubt you have anything decent to eat in your apartment,” she called from across the room, interrupting his train of thought. As she spoke, there was a loud gust of wind from outside and an even louder thud, and suddenly the room went pitch black.

“Rosemary?” Anxiety replaced the irritation. He carefully set the syringe he had been holding down, hoping that he remembered the location of the dish he had been resting it against properly.

“It’s fine,” she called back in a calm, even tone. “Emergency generators will kick in soon.”

“Very well.” Karl stood there, frozen, until the hum of electricity filled the room once more, along with the dim red of the lab’s emergency lighting.

Karl picked the syringe up again, getting back to work as quickly as possible, not caring that he might need to re-do his work later. He wanted to be back in his apartment, not in a glass-walled lab building five stories off the ground. There was the quick tap of heels, and then Rosemary was back at his side. The pair of them fell into an effortless dance, working with and around one another to finish processing the rest of the samples as quickly as possible.

“Here, I’ll take them, you start scrubbing this down,” Rosemary said once the racks were full.

Karl made quick work of wiping everything down as Rosemary returned for the dirty glassware, shoving it all in the autoclave. “Emergency generators are just for vital equipment, so we can’t run it while the power’s out,” she said, joining him at the sink for a final scrub-down of her person, “but at least it’ll be ready to go when it comes back on.”

Karl grunted his agreement. “You are done?”

“Just a moment.” Rosemary shook her hands dry and grabbed a paper towel to dab what moisture remained off her hands. “Shall we?” She bustled past him without waiting for an answer, and was halfway across the room before he started following. He caught up with her a second later and could not understand why she was not already in the hall, or at least not until he noticed that the handle of the lab door was refusing to turn under her hand.

Another loud gust of wind startled him, and he jumped. He set a hand on Rosemary’s shoulder to steady himself. “Something is wrong?”

“I don’t know,” she said, a deep frown digging furrows at the corners of her mouth. “The lab doors have electronic locks, but they’re only supposed to lock down against exterior access, not against egress.” She tried the handle again, and made a frustrated noise when it didn’t even budge an inch.

“Let me try.” Karl put his hand on the handle and Rosemary stepped back to give him room.

It didn’t move for him, either. Karl jiggled the knob back and forth, or at least tried to, just to make sure. “Hm.”

“I’m going to have to have a little discussion with the security team. And engineering.” Rosemary’s voice sounded deliberately light, as if she were forcing amusement about the situation. “This is remarkably inconvenient.”

It would have been inconvenient enough if Karl had been locked in the lab alone, as he would have been if Rosemary had not come to check on him. But being locked in there with her was something else entirely. He needed to get them out of there. “We could try to remove hinges. Or perhaps unscrew the handle?”

Rosemary was examining the hinges now. “They’re flattened on both ends, so unless you’ve added a bolt cutter to your lab toolbox since I did my last inventory...”

“No.” And when he knelt to take a proper look, there were no visible screws on the plating that surrounded the handle, and it was so flush with the surface of the door that he did not think he could get anything strong enough to pry it away between the two. “And it does not seem likely that my other idea would work either.”

“Let me take a look.” Rosemary crouched down at his side, her hand on his shoulder to steady herself. Karl froze like a prey animal, his pulse thrumming hard in his ears, almost drowning out Rosemary’s disappointed “Oh, I see,” as she examined the plating.

She got back to her feet a moment later and bustled off elsewhere in his lab. Karl sat there, trying to regain control of himself and mostly failing.

She was so... so... so damn tempting, he realized, finding the word in a mental rush that left him almost sick with longing. He felt unmoored sometimes in her presence, as if he had only been half a person until he had met her. As if every instinct called him to make himself whole with her, only he had kept himself so far from other people his entire life that he didn’t know what he was meant to do now that he had found her.

Rosemary’s hand came down on his shoulder again, startling him out of his stupor. “You all right there? Make any progress?”

“Mm.” He turned his head to look up at her. “No.”

She was holding a box of the protein bars she stocked his lab with in her other hand, and lowered it to his level. “Here. It’s not a proper meal, but you should eat something.”

Karl took one of the protein bars out of the box with a grunt of thanks and tore into it, suddenly ravenous.

Hunger. That was another good distraction from how he was feeling. A good distraction from that other hunger, from that urge to... what?

What did he want from her?

Maybe there was nothing confusing about it. Maybe it was what it seemed to be, base lust for the woman’s body. Maybe all he wanted from her was a good fuck to clear his mind out, and it was only her forbidden status as his lab manager that had him obsessing over her like this.

But even if that forbidden lust was all he felt, it would be enough to torture him for as long as they were locked in his lab together.

He finished the protein bar and glanced around. No sign of Rosemary, and the lab was silent, except for the sound of the storm outside.

Where had she gotten herself to? And what kind of trouble was she getting up to, anyway?

Rosemary rooted through Dr. Kelley’s desk drawers, looking for alternatives to the protein bars. Surely the man must keep something else in here. He couldn’t possibly rely only on her offerings, could he?

“What are you doing?” His voice came from near the door, sounding faintly amused. She poked her head up over the top of the desk to look at him, but couldn’t make out details of his expression in the dim red emergency lighting.

A pity. She’d pay good money to see the man look properly amused by something, what with the way his face tended towards grumpiness and exhaustion. “I’m looking for something other than protein bars. Surely you have a packet of ramen in here or something?”

“Ramen?” He paused, considering. “I cannot imagine how we would cook such a thing.”

“Bunsen burners don’t need electricity.”

His eyebrows went up, as if he had not considered this. “Back of middle drawer on left. Should be some there.”

A bit of excavation later, and she managed to unearth a single package of chicken ramen, somewhat battered, and even better, a packet of plastic silverware, a discard from some takeout meal or another. She carried both triumphantly out to the lab, where Dr. Kelley had set up a Bunsen burner and a little stand and had put his largest flask, full of water, to boil.

“You made sure that was clean first, didn’t you?”

He shot her an irritated look. “Yes.”

She threw her hands up defensively. “It wasn’t an attack on you, darling.”

Oh, that slip of the tongue got her a very strange look from him. She tried not to use such endearments in his presence, for all that she scattered them freely among the other scientists she supervised. Not that he had shown any signs of disliking them. But she had shown signs of meaning them, and that wasn’t to be countenanced in the slightest.

They were silent as the ramen cooked. When it was done, Rosemary dished part of it out into a smaller beaker, leaving Dr. Kelley the lion’s share of the impromptu meal along with the fork from the packet of silverware.

He raised a dubious eyebrow at her when she set the large beaker in front of him. “You should take more.”

“ _I_ ate real food for lunch,” she said pointedly.

Dr. Kelley sighed and picked up the fork. “Very well.”

They ate in silence too, aside from the rain and continued gusts of wind from outside and the undignified slurping that Rosemary had to resort to in order to get the noodles back out of the wide-mouthed beaker with only an inadequate plastic spoon to help her. By now, she was starting to feel the loss of the air conditioning. The air in the lab was growing hotter and more humid by the moment, and the heat from the ramen soup was only exacerbating the situation.

She set her beaker aside and unbuttoned her suit jacket, shrugging out of it and frowning at its rumpled state. Well, linen always did wrinkle like a bitch; it didn’t need getting caught in a storm to get this bad if the humidity was high enough. She shook it out half-heartedly before folding it in half and setting it on the end of the lab table.

At her side, Dr. Kelley made a strangled noise, loud enough to be heard over the storm outside. Rosemary glanced his way to find him staring wide-eyed at her... and yes, as far as she could tell, his gaze was locked on her chest. Not exactly the sort of thing she expected from him, even if he were attracted to women, which his past behavior said he was unlikely to be. And Goddard’s background checks were _very_ thorough.

She looked deliberately down at her own chest. “Did I spill something?”

She looked back at Dr. Kelley as he made that same strangled, guttural noise again, just in time to meet his eye as his eyes darted to her face. And then they darted away just as quickly, fixed on his hands, one gripping the edge of the table, one looking as if it were about to snap the plastic fork in half.

“That shirt is... translucent,” he muttered.

Rosemary glanced down at her shirtfront again. It _was_ a thin shirt, and rain had done little to help the matter. She tugged at the shirtfront, pulling it away from her skin, but it just settled back against her, clinging damply. “Not sure there’s much I can do about that now that I’ve started to sweat.”

Another strangled noise. She was really starting to worry about him now.

“Something wrong?”

“Nothing,” he hissed.

“Doesn’t sound like nothing’s wrong.” Rosemary reached out to touch his arm and he flinched away from her, then reached up and grabbed her wrist to make sure she could not try again.

“Please. Please do not touch me.” His voice was weak with desperation, and that worried her even more, but she pulled back from him all the same.

“All right. But you tell me what’s wrong.”

Dr. Kelley covered the lower half of his face with his hands, letting out a muffled scream of laughter. “You do not even know,” he said, lifting his head and staring wide-eyed at her. “I am like this, and you are so... so damn far above me that you would never even notice.”

She looked him over carefully, but could see nothing wrong. No sign of any injury, at least not that she could make out in the red of the emergency lighting. Nothing wrong with him except... except...

Oh.

“That’s... one hell of an erection,” she said, too startled to be anything but blunt.

Dr. Kelley made that strangled noise once again.

“It’s for me?”

“Yes,” he hissed, low and despairing. “This is because of you.”

“I didn’t mean to... well.” Rosemary fanned her face, trying to cool the hot blush that rushed across it. She knew she should look away from him and give him space, but she couldn’t quite manage it.

“I know. My attraction is my own problem.” Dr. Kelley was studying his hands intently, as if he were incapable of looking at anything else.

“Though really, _me_? You have to have better taste than that.”

He glanced up sharply. “You are fantastic. And you know it.”

The words hit her like a blow, knocking the breath out of her lungs. She turned away from that intent stare, which was now focused entirely on her. “I didn’t think I was your type, to be honest.”

“What type is mine, then?” His voice was suddenly, unexpectedly warm with amusement, and she shot him a look out of the corner of her eye. No smile on his lips, but gentle crinkles at the corners of his eyes lightened the intensity of his expression.

“Well, you know.” She waved her hand through the air. “Men.”

“Ah.” He was silent for a moment. “That would be accurate.”

“Well, I’m about as far from a man as you can get.” Rosemary gestured down at her body.

“That is also accurate.”

“So why?” She looked at him head-on again, lifting her chin in a challenge.

He studied her face. “I think... I think because you have taken the time to know me. Because no one else ever has.”

Not the answer she had been expecting. “It’s my job to know you well. I’m here to make you more efficient.”

“Is it your job to know from sound of my growling when I have eaten only protein bar for lunch?”

“Yes. People are less efficient when they aren’t well fed.”

“Is it your job to come back and check on me when any sensible person would have left the building hours ago?”

“You left a light on! I wanted to turn it off.” And she had wanted to know he was safely back in the apartment complex, but she wasn’t going to confess that to him.

Somehow, he was looming over her now, as if he had been leaning closer and closer as they argued this point. She put her hand up, pressing it to his chest as if to push him back, and found herself incapable of pushing him away at all.

He lifted one of his hands and placed it over hers, his fingers curling around her own. “Is it your job to touch me?” he asked, his voice so low and tender it sent a shiver down her spine. “Is it your job to make certain I do not feel alone?”

“Of course it is,” she protested weakly.

He lifted her hand from his chest and pressed a kiss to the palm. Another shiver travelled the length of her spine. “Tell me to stop,” he said quietly. “Tell me to go away.”

“Do you want me to?”

“No.” He pressed a kiss to the pulse point in her wrist next, his lips warm against her skin. “But I will stop all the same.”

“I’m not telling you to stop.” And she was completely incapable of breathing properly.

Dr. Kelley let out a contented little murmur. His free arm snaked around her waist, drawing her close and fast against him, his face a bare inch from hers. “You are certain?”

Rosemary shut her eyes and tilted her head back, and an instant later his mouth was on hers.

Oh, this was better than she had been imagining, not that she should have been imagining it at all. But she had been, and here she was, kissing the man she’d been wanting for three years. And for all that she knew it was a bad idea, right this moment she was willing to take whatever he would give to her, no matter how much rationalization she had to do to accept it.

Karl paused, his mouth barely brushing against Rosemary’s. Even this close, the red emergency lighting made it hard to make out her expression, but he thought there was a certain dazed longing to it, all the same.

“Dmitri?” Her voice was soft and careful, and her use of his birth name cut him to the core.

Karl cleared his throat, but his voice came out raspy all the same. “You know that Dmitri Vologin was dead.”

She sighed, her breath warm against his lips. “I know. But I can kiss a dead man.” Her eyelids, which had been half-closed and heavy with desire, flashed open so that she could look at him intently. “Karl Kelley, Goddard Futuristics scientist and my direct report, he’s off limits, or at least he should be. But Dmitri Vologin...” her fingers feathered along his throat, cupped his cheek. “Him I’m allowed to want.”

“He has been dead for three years. Even his corpse has rotted away.” And the woman in his arms had made sure of it, had made sure that Karl accepted his new name and new life, even as he chafed against it.

“I know.” Her hand returned to his chest, and she he could not tell if she was planning to pull him closer or was getting ready to push him away, and oh, blyad, he was so desperate for this woman, desperate enough to promise a truly foolish thing.

“I could resurrect him.”

She froze.

“Let me bring him back to life for you. As long as we are trapped in this place, I will be Dmitri Vologin.” And what a lie that was. He could never be Dmitri Vologin again, but if it got him past Rosemary’s guard, he would take it.

She let out a whispery little sigh, barely audible over the storm. And then her hands were on either side of his face, pulling him down into a deep, frantic kiss, and his awareness of the storm faded away entirely. Karl wrapped his arms around her waist and tugged her firmly against him, letting a low groan at the heat of her body against his. Her skin seemed almost feverish to his touch, her mouth a burning brand, and he wanted to swallow the fire of her whole.

“Rosemary,” he gasped when she broke away to press kisses to his jaw and neck. Her fingers went to the buttons of his shirt and he buried his face against her neck with a moan, beyond all sensible thought. Her name was the only word he knew, her body the only world.

Too much. This was too much and not enough, and he needed more. More of her mouth against his, more of her skin bared to his touch.

She tugged his shirt free from his trousers, spread the front wide open as her mouth trailed along his collarbone, little kisses and nips that left his skin feeling strangely sensitive in their wake. And then her mouth found one of his nipples and he could not think, could not breathe, could only jerk helplessly in her arms, could only thrust his hips mindlessly against her.

“Rosemary,” he moaned, and she lifted her mouth from his chest. He watched, dazed, as she stepped back from him, as she stripped herself of that translucent blouse and her skirt and dropped both on the end of the table with her jacket.

She was not a young woman, his Rosemary. She was not a thin woman, either; her weight was marked in wrinkles and folds, in the wide curve of a stomach just barely contained by a girdle, in a chest he suspected would sag a good deal once her bra was removed. And then she removed her underclothes as well and stood there naked in front of him, curves and folds and sagging chest, confident and defiant.

He thought she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

She crowded back in against him, one hand working the buckle of his belt, the other caressing his length through his trousers, and Karl lost his capacity to think about anything but the moment at hand. The sounds of the storm outside faded into nothing in the face of what she was offering.

He needed… he needed…

Instinct drove him to urge her up on one of the tall lab stools, and he was between her thighs now. His lips were on her neck and her hands were on his hips, and suddenly his trousers and boxers fell to his knees and those wicked fingers of hers were guiding his cock to her cunt.

One thrust gained him purchase, a second sent him deep inside her, enveloped in her heat. A third buried him completely, and oh, he was lost. Lost in this moment, and lost in her.

Some vague part of him was aware of her hand between them, rubbing herself to completion as he seized her hips and fucked her hard, and he focused on that, his empty mind turning to the thought that he wanted to claim her as his own, in whatever way she would let him.

“Tell me what you need,” he gasped against her ear as he released his hand from its tight grip on her hip and worked it between them to join hers. “Show me. Teach me.”

Her fingertips, wet and slick, captured his hand, drew it between the lips of her cunt, pressed his fingers down upon the hard little nubbin of her clitoris. She guided him at first, an insistent press of her fingers over his until he managed to find a rhythm that made her gasp low and sudden as she slumped forward against his chest. “Like that,” she whispered, her voice a barely-audible rasp. “Faster,” she added, wrapping her legs tight around his waist, trailing fingers down his spine.

She clenched around him, hard and fast, let out a noise like a breathless scream. Karl freed his hand and seized her hips hard once more, no longer capable of anything resembling patience, until a few moments later his own orgasm caught him by surprise, blanked out what few thoughts he had left in a series of shudders. He thought it was only Rosemary’s arms around him that kept him upright.

His first sensible thought was that his glasses would be horribly smudged, the way his face was buried against Rosemary’s neck.

“We should get some paper towels,” Rosemary murmured. But she did not seem at all interested in letting him go. Her fingers were stroking the back of his neck, her other arm tucked comfortably around his waist, and Karl could not bring himself to pull away.

“Did you mean all that stuff?” her voice came again, raspy against his ear.

“That stuff?” he asked, not understanding.

“About it mattering. All the things I do that are just my job.”

He still did not understand.

She sighed. “I make sure all my other reports eat properly too, you know. And I’d have come back to check on just about anyone, if I’d seen any other lights on in the building.”

“Ah, but only I am unintelligent enough to stay in lab when hurricane is incoming.” Those words tasted bitter in his mouth, and he hated himself for flinging them at her the moment they had passed his lips.

“Oh, stop being an asshole.” She released him and gave his shoulder a little shove, so that he had no option but to straighten up.

“Did _you_ mean it, then?” he asked, glaring down at her. “That the only reason you do the things you do is to make me more _efficient_?” He spat the last word at her, and she flinched away from him.

“Stop that, darling. Have some dignity.” But she would not look at him, and Karl found it infuriating.

“You said you wanted me,” he snarled, pulling back from her and going for a nearby roll of paper towels. They were coarse, low-quality things, but they did the job of cleaning him up well enough.

“I said no such thing.” Her voice was steady and cold, a calculated withdrawal.

No, she had not, had she? She had said that she _could_ want Dmitri Vologin, not that she did. Not that there was anything of Dmitri Vologin left to want.

But she had kissed him back, and she had shown him what gave her pleasure, and that had to count for something.

“I want you,” he offered up grudgingly, along with a clean wad of the terrible paper towels, though he could not bear to look at her as he offered either. She took the paper towels and he rucked his boxers and trousers back up around his hips. “I do not even know why. I just do. I want you.”

She made a dismissive noise.

Karl rounded on her. “I want you,” he said again, and she looked up at him, a wide, terrified look. “I want you,” he said yet again, “every part of you.”

“Stop it.” Her eyes darted away and she wrapped her arms around herself protectively. “I’m not worth wanting. Not like that.”

“I want you.”

“Don’t you dare.” Rosemary lifted her chin defiantly at him. “This was a mistake. I’m not going to make another.”

“I want you.” She was ignoring him now, trying to clean up the mess that had pooled between her thighs, but Karl persisted. “I want you,” he said in a low, careful voice, as if trying to soothe a startled animal. “How could I not?”

“You just want to get laid again,” she snapped.

“Probably,” he admitted. “But that is not why I want you.” Or at least only part of it, though he would leap on any chance she gave him for further intimacies.

“Give me one fucking reason why I should believe you,” she snarled.

He went back to soothing her, his voice gentle, hoping she would be able to hear him properly over the storm outside. “Give me time, Rosemary. Give me days and weeks and months and years, and I will prove it to you again and again. As many times as I need to.”

Her eyes flashed up to meet his, wide and stricken, and then away. And then she was very still for a long moment before her shoulders started shaking.

Laughing or crying? He could not tell. He stepped in close, and closer still, and yes, those were tears running down her cheeks. Karl let out an involuntary cluck of concern and dug in the pocket of his trousers for his handkerchief, offering it up silently. Rosemary snatched it out of his hands and buried her face in it.

“God, I hate you right now.” Her voice was even more raspy than usual, the words sounding as if they had been torn from her throat. “How fucking _dare_ you offer me something like that.”

Karl only took a step closer, close enough that now he could wrap his arms around her. She was cold and stiff against him only for a moment; her sudden relaxation brought a smile to his face as she buried her face against his chest and tucked her feet behind his knees.

“I resent this.”

“I know,” he murmured softly against her wig.

“I hate that I want it.”

“I can tell.” He hated that he still wanted it too, that this did not seem to be some passing fancy he could set aside. But Rosemary had voiced enough doubts for the pair of them; he was not going to burden her with his as well. So instead, he just held her.

Perhaps this small moment inside a storm was all they could have.

He would take it.


End file.
